Well I completely missed the first quarter earnings season, for which I apologize. However, the Nerds of Steel earnings spreadsheet is now up to date with the latest EBITDA per ton for most of the major steel producers operating in the North American market. I’ve also added some mills that we hadn’t been covering – Commercial Metals, Evraz and SSAB. I also revised the Severstal data so that it includes all of Severstal, not just the the NA operations. Hope the spreadsheet is helpful. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you have any suggestions or questions.
Worldsteel published April’s global crude steel production statistics on May 21st and while monthly crude steel production dropped 2.8% to 128.4 million metric tonnes, due to the short April month, daily crude steel production rose 0.5% to a record 4.279 million tonnes.
China’s average daily production in April was 2% higher than March’s which counteracted significant declines in daily production in countries including Germany, Italy and Turkey. In contrast, the United Kingdom was the only country which showed a significant daily and monthly increase, rising 194,000 tonnes in April or an average 7,000 tons per day due to the April re-commissioning of the Sahaviriya Steel Industries UK Teesside blast furnace acquired from Tata Steel.
As usual, all the data for April 2012 (and for a number of prior years) is generously shared in the Nerdsspreadsheet below.
Based on reported import licenses, US long products imports fell 3% from 278,000 short tons in March to 270,000 tons in April. In comparison, March long products imports in 2011 were 239,000 tons, in 2010 232,000 tons, in 2009 168,000 tons, and in 2008 314,000 tons.
The small change in April imports reflected a drop in rebar imports due to lower volumes from Turkey which was mostly counteracted by a rise in wire rod imports.
May long products imports licenses reported up to May 15th were 95,000 tons, which is likely to mean that full-month May imports will be lower than April’s.
Based on reported import licenses, US flat products imports rose 34% from 660,000 short tons in March to 887,000 tons in April. This is the highest level of flat products imports since we started collecting data in September 2008.
The climb was driven by a 75% or 207,000-ton rise in hot rolled imports, with significant increases particularly from Russia, but also from Italy, Japan, Korea, and Canada. Hot dip galvanized imports increased by 52,000 tons due to higher imports from India, China, Italy and Taiwan.
I will update the spreadsheet below when licenses are updated this week in order to show mid-May licenses data.
worldsteel‘s forecast for growth in world apparent steel use in 2012 was revised downward from 5.4% in October 2011’s Short Range Outlook to 3.6% in April 2012’s Short Range Outlook published recently.
Driving the change in the forecast is worldsteel’s estimate that China’s steel use will grow by 4.0% in 2012 instead of by 6%. In contrast, the forecast for 2012 growth in apparent steel use in the US was revised marginally upward from 5.2% to 5.6%. Overall, world steel use in 2012 is expected to reach 1,422 million tonnes which is 18% higher than world steel use in 2007.
See the spreadsheet below for a better look at the numbers published in the April Short Range Outlook together with regional apparent steel use over the last few years.
Oh yes it was. Worldsteel published the latest global crude steel production statistics last week and the monthly output for March in total and on a daily basis was a record 132.2 million metric tonnes and 4.3 million metric tonnes respectively. China alone produced 61.6MT in the month, more than all but about 3 countries in the world make in a year. But beyond this headline bumper month, there are a couple of other interesting points to note.
Q1 2012 was not the best global production quarter. In fact, Q1 2012 at 376.74 million tonnes was only about 450 thousand tonnes up on Q1 2011 with an extra day of production due to the leap year. And it’s still below last year’s Q2 performance of 384.3 million tonnes which remains the quarterly record. Q2 is invariably better than Q1. Also, now that worldsteel is providing utilization numbers, we can infer changes in capacity year to year. Between January 2009 and January 2010, those numbers suggest the global addition of 93MT of capacity or about 6% of the installed base. Between January 2010 and January 2011, the numbers indicate an increase of 116MT in global crude steelmaking capacity or about 7% growth. In the 12 months to January 2012 however, the data suggest the addition of only about 37MT or less than 2% growth. Despite some additions since January, perhaps the global industry is showing some capacity restraint.
All the data for you to work out your own interesting nuggets are in the Nerds spreadsheet below:
